ARCHIVED - Radical right-wingers Vox gaining support in Spain for anti-immigration policies

Could expats lose their rights if the party linked with Franco defines government policy?

With four weeks to go until the general election in Spain on 28th April the latest opinion poll published this Monday forecasts some sweeping changes since the last time Spaniards voted for their national government in 2016.

At first glance the poll brings good news for the current PSOE government, which after taking power following a vote of no confidence in the PP administration last spring has suffered from its holding only 85 of the seats in the national parliament. If the latest opinion poll is correct the socialists would win 31 per cent of the votes this time round, giving them between 131 and 134 MPs and bringing a left-wing majority by means of an alliance within touching distance.

However, it may be that many of the “extra” PSOE votes would be coming from disenchanted voters who in 2016 enabled Unidos Podemos to achieve 71 seats, and with Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias having only just returned to active political life after taking extended paternity leave the party will be hoping to recover some of the lost ground over the next month. In addition, with his party standing to see their number of MPs drop to only 27, the left-wing alliance would need to include Basque, Catalan and Galician separatist parties as well, a possibility which would no doubt cause problems especially with regard to the independence movement in Catalunya.

But the most eye-catching result of the latest poll is in the other half of the political spectrum, where the PP party is forecast to see a catastrophic fall in its share of the vote from 33 per cent to 21.9 per cent. This would mean under 100 MPs, and to have any prospect of forming a government the party would need to make an alliance with numerous other parties, again including separatists.

The reasons for the PP’s decline are various, but doubtless one of the most important is the emergence of the radical right-wing party Vox. This group caused a sensation in December in the regional election in Andalucía, when they won 12 of the 109 seats in the regional parliament and subsequently called many of the shots in agreeing to allow the PP to take power after decades of PSOE rule in the region, and all of the polls conducted since conclude that they are also gaining popularity in the rest of the country.

For many observers the rise of Vox is worrying, and British expats in Spain should not imagine that they are unaffected. One of the key elements of the party’s ideology is a strong stand on immigration, which they claim is largely responsible for many of the problems in society (including domestic and gender violence) and UK nationals are, after all, an immigrant group – and even more so assuming that Brexit goes ahead!

Throughout the preparations for the departure of the UK from the EU, successive Spanish governments have reassured British residents that their status and rights will continue to be protected in Spain, and continued residency permits were guaranteed in late February. But with Vox forecast to take between 24 and 27 seats in the next parliament (including 2 of the 10 representatives of the Region of Murcia) and so vehemently opposed to unrestricted foreign nationals, there must be a worry that at some point in the future government policy could come under pressure from reformers.

Come what may over the next month, it seems inevitable that Vox will have significant representation in the next Spanish parliament, and again this will be a worry for many not only in this country, but also in the rest of Europe. It is alleged in the national press on Monday that one of the men who have financed the party during its rise to prominence is Jaime Alonso, spokesman for the Fundación Francisco Franco: this is a group which exalts and glorifies the man who ruled as a dictator until his death in 1975.

44 years later, following a hard struggle to establish democracy, it is clear that there is still a large sector of the population who can easily be persuaded to support policies not dissimilar to some of those of the “Generalísimo”, and while the majority of Spaniards would reject a return to the “bad old days” this ought to be a cause for concern among the expat population.

Image: Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, addresses supporters in Ciudad Real

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